March 2001: Minneapolis

Seize the Day Job

Plans can change very quickly it seems. One minute we were in Long Island attempting the triple whammy of opening a branch of the business, signing up a house lease, and buying a Volkswagen with no American credit history (a near impossibility here, the conversation steering quickly to “ah, so I see you have the first born on the way then…”) then suddenly we are setting ourselves up in the frozen state of Minnesota, home of the coldest capital city in the United States. Proudly beating Alaska for the title.

The ‘deal’ that was to take ePredix from California to Long Island, New York came to a sudden impasse forcing a retreat North to the company’s main office. When Nigel took this job one year ago this week, who would have foreseen that we would now be sitting in an apartment on the 16th floor overlooking the ice encrusted upper reaches of the Mississippi? As it turns out, with hindsight of two weeks it is not a bad place to be.

We didn’t so much as leave San Francisco, as just forget to go back. A perfectly scheduled trans-continental round trip devolved into the usual crisis du jour and here we all are. Not quite all either – Marmalade the cat is not due for another week or so. At work we have consolidated our acquisitions into a beautiful (ex Lloyds Bank subsidiary that didn’t survive a Nasdaq in the 1900’s) 35th floor tower block for $9/ square foot, around 1/8 of the price of something similar in SF even after the crash.



We have come to a very bad example of winter we are told. A spell of 120 days below 40F° (5C°) has just been broken in the last few days, whereas last year there was only 20 consecutive days that cold. When we arrived two weeks ago it was -20F° (-30C°), too cold to snow as the air is incredibly dry and there is no cloud cover to keep and heat in.

Now we are in March, a big month for snow as the temperatures gets up to around freezing point. Twelve inches of white powder yesterday and six inches of grit and salt flavoured slushie today in a balmy 34F° (2C°). It’s amazing how warm that suddenly feels.

The day we moved in to RiverWest apartments it was Zero degrees. Our Australian neighbour turned up in shorts to lift and carry, and the rest of us had t-shirts on. We were pleased to be re-acquainted with all of our possessions, and even more delighted when the truck driver gave us $100 at the end of the morning for helping. Never in 11 years of delivering furniture in the USA had the people who owned the furniture lifted a finger to help him. Another tiny insight into two cultures separated by a common language.

Weather Obsession

Everyone here is obsessed with weather as it is a survival issue. People die going outside for a walk. Going out in the car means being equipped with a survival pack of thermal blankets, food and water and shovels to dig yourself out in case of a breakdown. The TV has a dedicated 24-hour local weather station and our car radio has a dedicated weather broadcast button (so that’s what the ‘WB’ button is for!).

Fahrenheit, we’ve decided, must have been someone’s ploy to distract the proletariat of an eastern bloc country in the 1950’s from the monotonous tractor factory travails. It’s a whole conversation in itself just figuring out how damn cold it is. It makes the Celsius scale look like a work of staggering genius (well, make boiling point 100 and then freezing zero, and anything below that is damned cold…).

The roads, although well groomed, are lethal in the late afternoons as any snow that has melted in the middle of the day turns to ice. It took as about two minutes on the I-394 highway to decide that a 4 wheel drive was the only car for us, hence we have a leased Subaru Outback down in the (heated) garage. Motorized luge could be a new event in Salt Lake next year. The general conditions plus the grit and salt used on the roads to keep them negotiable don’t do much for the longevity of vehicles. Many look like Nanna’s doilies with the accumulated rust of only a few seasons.

A Minnesota car is especially built. Apart from the WB button on the radio, there are heated windscreen wiper blades (to stop them freezing to the glass); heated windscreen spray nozzles; no aerial (they break off under snow chunks that fly off the roof after a storm); heated seats (two settings including sizzle); heated mirrors; heated engine block; snow tyres; 1500 mile service intervals due to oil breakdown in the cold; larger petrol tanks to reduce stops at gas stations that resemble McMurdo Station in Antarctica; along with a myriad of places to store supplies for when you get snowed in.

The roads are interesting once the snow clears a bit – no dividing lines are left visible from the constant grit slushie they endure. Driving can be a bit un-nerving when the left lane is half covered with a blackened snow mountain and the remaining lanes are without lines or a centerline. Is this 3 lanes North and one South, or 2 lanes each way? Just exactly where is the line to stop at this intersection?

Still, all that aside, once you have got over the fact that it is really really cold outside for a good part of the year it so far seems a pretty good city. It is well built for the conditions. Driving around the place looks completely deserted. In the central city there are no shop frontages as all retail begins one floor up in the Skyway that runs through all the major downtown buildings including where Nigel works. It’s like a giant 4 ½ mile hamster tunnel criss-crossing the city. We live about a block away from the Skyway so it’s a matter of piling on coats enough for a short dash then we’re all cosy and having to carry all our gear for the rest of the outing.

Left My Debt in San Francisco

There’s plenty of challenging outdoor activities to be had. Nigel has been out cross-country skiing for the first time. Friends went out dog sledding this weekend and there is ice-skating, snowboarding, snowshoeing and all manner of frosty pastimes. All these things Lesley will be saving for next winter, as at 30 weeks pregnant crossing an icy street seems adventure enough.

Still, spring is on it’s way and by all accounts summers are splendid here - ignoring the fact that the 12,000 lakes that make the state beautiful are responsible for breeding mosquitos that have earned the crown of ‘official state bird’.

The cultural diversity of California is not apparent here. The population seems to be dominated by fair-haired pale people, Nordic stock I guess. For some reason there is the anomaly of a sizable Nigerian population. What attracts them here I have yet to ascertain. In general our experiences so far show people here to be very friendly and genuine, a reprieve after a year of self obsessed Californians.

People are just so nice. Even the intimidating ‘homies’ hanging out at the mall with their Tommy Hilfiger jeans worn with the in-pant anti-gravity generator, big puffa jackets and LL Cool J beanies open doors for Lesley and ask her when the baby is due, is it a boy or a girl, where are we from?

We wonder sometimes what to spend the surplus cash on – we have an apartment twice the size of our garret in SF, completely redecorated and newly furnished, a new car and still enough money left over to begin the offspring’s college fund before we even get up to what rent cost on the Left Coast.

The Columns of Porsches (CPI) Index

As I tracked (some might say caused) the rise and fall of the Silicon Empire in San Francisco, I devised a new state of the economy index. When we first arrived in SF, the Chronicle on Saturday had less than half a column of Porsches for sale in the classifieds. Old 1970s rust buckets, a few 1980s viagra-powered muscle cars with too many miles on the clock and no sign of the German holy grail – a 1996 Targa S. Times were too, too good.

As the new economic world fell apart, the classified columns grew. By mid-year, the slim pickings on the CPI had exploded to include a few 1990s models coming back from failed CEO leaseholders at www.justanothertotallyuselessdeliveryservice.com, accompanied by a sprinkling of ‘really must sell’ notices from the Valley.

By January 2001, the CPI had reached 4 full columns, with at least two inches of 1996 Targa S models to be had in black, white, silver, or blue, with low miles, a free service, a car cover and full references (both personal and mechanical).

Immediately upon arriving in Minneapolis I bought the local Saturday paper and scanned for the classifieds. O for Oldsmobile, P for Pontiac, and then straight to S for Saturn. Not a single heavenly glass roofed curvaceous boxer-engined body in between. With a ‘thank god the debate is over whether a child seat could be shoehorned into a 911’smile on her face, Lesley pointed out that with 4 columns of second-hand snowmobiles for sale it was unlikely they had room in that edition.

All kinds of Implements

As a farm boy from way back, there’s a lot of comfort in picking up the local paper on Sunday and having 3 or 4 inserts for bargains on tractor tyres and animal medicines crash among the lattes. A town with Monster Trucks every month, Supercross each season under the giant dome of the indoor stadium, RV shows and a big Agricultural expo has got to be a place I want to live.

We bought a map book of Minnesota last week (249 pages of blanks and 1 city) and ventured North to see the sights. I swear when they were thinking up state mottos that ‘She’s pretty flat, mostly’ would have been a finalist. The book reputes to have contour lines drawn on at 60 foot intervals – I challenge anyone to find even one! There are things you can do here that cannot be dreamed of where I grew up. Imagine driving your car onto Lake Taupo in winter and doing donuts to your heart’s content for example. Or driving right to the middle to drill a hole and go fishing through 4 feet of ice.

Preparations are well under way for the arrival of the American in our family. We bought the stroller (push-chair to our antipodean friends), borrowed the bed thingy and have started the clothing collection. It seems amazing that it is so hard to enter this country on a Visa yet the mere act of being born here entitles you to citizenship and a passport. Mind you, he will have to live down explaining to his friends why his birth certificate says ‘Minnesota’.